Meet opentab

• 😰 Tired of having hundreds of tabs open in your browser?
• 😡 Tired of saying: I'll keep this tab open so that tomorrow I can study this thing better?
• 😫 Tired of being sad when closing them all after forgetting why you opened them lately?

Then opentab is the bash utility made for you!

opentab is a CLI tool that lets you save your browser tabs in a structured way so that you can relax and read or work on them later.

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Index

• Getting Started
  • Installation
  • Initialize opentab
  • Add a test group
  • Open the test group
• Why opentab
• Features
  • Add tabs
  • Remove tabs
  • Open tabs
  • List tabs
  • Init opentab
  • Reset opentab
• Low-Level Details
  • tabs.yaml
• Contribute
  • Devel Environment

Getting started (The fast way)

opentab lets you save browser tabs in groups that you can easily open them later. The only thing you need is your CLI!

Installation

opentab can be easily installed using pip. Simply issue this command:

pip install opentab

And you are done! opentab is installed in your system.

Please note that opentab is written in Python, and it downloads some depencencies with it. We do not suggest you to use a virtual environment for using opentab. Instead, consider using a virtual environment for your other projects if you don't do it.

Initialize opentab

To initialize opentab, simply use this command:

opentab init

This initializes opentab's workspace. After this step, opentab is ready to be used. The following content is for explanatory purpose only. For a full list of available commands, refer to commands.

Add a group with some URLs

This operation is incredibly easy.

opentab add test_group "https://github.com/endriu00/opentab" "https://github.com/endriu00/opentab/issues"

Open a group of tabs

Why opentab

Think of it like a tab organizer: most of the time, you need to open again and again the same group of tabs, like your job's email webpage, your company's internal websites you have to login into everyday, your job's Slack account. Sometimes, you are working on something and you start opening pages over pages in your browser. This leads to tens or more tabs per argument that you are not willing to close. The automatic instinct you have is to bookmark them all and put them inside a folder in your browser. Now the fact is: you could use any add-on your browser is provided of, but you will soon lose track of the tabs you saved. And, worst, you need to search for them everytime and this is so unfriendly. Moreover, if you decide to change your default browser, you would need to export them all in some ways. opentab resolves all these issues, and it does letting you organize your tabs in groups that you can directly consult in your shell.

Exactly, if you are a shell lover, you can save all your tabs and open them using your shell only. These are just some of the features of opentab!

Features

Add tabs

opentab is useless if you cannot populate it with your favourite tabs! The add command is the command you will probably use the most along with the open command (check it out at open).

The available commands are:

• Add one empty group.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab add cool_group_name

• Add one URL to a specific group.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab add cool_group_name single_url

• Add more than one URL to a specific group.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab add cool_group_name first_url second_url [...] nth_url

opentab open test_group

opentab will open the URLs in your default browser. Simple, isn't it?

Why opentab

Think of it like a tab organizer: most of the time, you need to open again and again the same group of tabs, like your job's email webpage, your company's internal websites you have to login into everyday, your job's Slack account. Sometimes, you are working on something and you start opening pages over pages in your browser. This leads to tens or more tabs per argument that you are not willing to close. The automatic instinct you have is to bookmark them all and put them inside a folder in your browser. Now the fact is: you could use any add-on your browser is provided of, but you will soon lose track of the tabs you saved. And, worst, you need to search for them everytime and this is so unfriendly. Moreover, if you decide to change your default browser, you would need to export them all in some ways. opentab resolves all these issues, and it does letting you organize your tabs in groups that you can directly consult in your shell.

Exactly, if you are a shell lover, you can save all your tabs and open them using your shell only. These are just some of the features of opentab!

Features

Add tabs

opentab is useless if you cannot populate it with your favourite tabs! The add command is the command you will probably use the most along with the open command (check it out at open).

The available commands are:

• Add one empty group.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab add cool_group_name

• Add one URL to a specific group.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab add cool_group_name single_url

• Add more than one URL to a specific group.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab add cool_group_name first_url second_url [...] nth_url

Remove tabs

What if your job on some tabs or some group of tabs is done? You don't want them to ruin your clean opentab workspace. You can simply delete them and do not worry about them anymore!

The available commands are:

• Remove one group and the tabs in it.
  ⚠️ Danger: this will delete the tabs in the group along with it. ⚠️
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab rm never_coming_back_group

• Remove one URL from a group.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab rm still_existing_group deleting_url

• Remove more than one URL from a group.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab rm still_existing_group deleting_url_1 [...] deleting_url_n

Open tabs

Now you have a good amount of groups and tabs. Let's see what opentab is capable of! Open a group of tabs specified by the group name.
The tabs will be opened in your default browser.

The available commands are:

Remove tabs

What if your job on some tabs or some group of tabs is done? You don't want them to ruin your clean opentab workspace. You can simply delete them and do not worry about them anymore!

The available commands are:

• Remove one group and the tabs in it.
  ⚠️ Danger: this will delete the tabs in the group along with it. ⚠️
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab rm never_coming_back_group

• Remove one URL from a group.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab rm still_existing_group deleting_url

• Remove more than one URL from a group.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab rm still_existing_group deleting_url_1 [...] deleting_url_n

Open tabs

Now you have a good amount of groups and tabs. Let's see what opentab is capable of! Open a group of tabs specified by the group name.
The tabs will be opened in your default browser.

The available commands are:

• Open the tabs in the group in an existing browser session.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab open cool_group_name

• Open the tabs in the group in a new browser session.
  The commands are:
  ✔️ opentab open --new-session cool_group_name
  ✔️ opentab open -n cool_group_name

List tabs

You have added so many tabs to opentab that you have lost the number. Or the name of your groups. No problem, opentab is here to help you. You can list:

• The groups.
• The tabs in a group.
• The tabs in every group.

The available commands are:

• List the groups you have saved.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab ls
• List the tabs in a group.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab ls cool_group_name
• List the tabs in each group along with the groups.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab ls -a

Init opentab

Like most known tools, opentab needs to be initialized. It is not that hard though. It is just a matter of a command. This is the very first thing you should do after installing opentab, if you do not want to get a really unfriendly error message.

The available command is:

• Initialize the workspace.
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab init

Reset opentab

You have probably messed around with opentab and its tabs.yaml file if you need to read this. No worries! While you could have lost your saved tabs, you can still get back to a fully working environment with a single command.

The available command is:

• Reset the workspace.
  ⚠️ Danger: this will delete every group and tabs in it. ⚠️
  The command is:
  ✔️ opentab reset

Low-Level Details

opentab does well its job. Let's see how it works.

tabs.yaml

One of the most important file for both the user and opentab is the tabs.yaml file. It stores the groups the user adds, and the URLs inside of each group. tabs.yaml can be found in the home directory under .opentab folder for Linux systems. It is recommended to not delete it in any case, as it would compromise the whole stability of the tool.

Contribute

You really like opentab but you see something that is not working or you want to add some cool features? You could do two things:

• Submit an issue.
• Submit an issue, open a pull request, work on the changes.

We prefer you to do the second, as it would be a great opportunity to dirt your own hands and contribute to an open source project, but we appreciate the first option too, as it sounds like someone is enjoying opentab and he finds it useful, or at least pretty. Below there are a few headlines to let you get started in case you want to contribute the hard way.

Devel Environment

What if you have collected hundreds of tabs in several groups, you start working on opentab to add new features or to fix existing ones, and suddenly your tabs.yaml file gets corrupted?
This is too bad.
And this happened to us.
This is why we have developed a "development environment" for opentab. This is how it works:

• There is a Makefile in the root of the repo.
• You can simply head to the root of the repo and type:

  make devel-up
  

  This way, it will setup a devel environment where you can do whatever you want to the workspace. You can even destroy it! Your precious tabs.yaml original file will not be touched.
  You may wonder how it works. It is really simple: what the command does is:
  • It will check for the existence of a directory: ~/.opentab/devel.
  • If the directory exists:
    • Devel environment is up.
  • Else:
    • Create the directory.
    • Initialize a tabs.yaml devel file.
      Now, every time you will launch an opentab command, it will refer to that tabs.yaml file instead of the original one. This is done by dynamically locating the tabs.yaml file when calling opentab:
      it will check whether the ~/.opentab/devel directory exists. If it exists, the variable that is used to determine the tabs.yaml location refers to that file.
• When you are done developing, remember to switch back to the normal file. You can do this by simply going to the root of the repo and type:

  make devel-down
  

  This will switch your opentab configuration back to the original tabs.yaml file.